I Program on the Subway

Here is a description of the daily commute by Michael Milken, 1980s junk bond king, as told in "Predator's Ball" by Connie Bruck:

At 5:30am each weekday in the early 1970s, a bus pulled up to a stop in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and a young man lugging a bag that bulged with papers mounted its steps. He was making the two-hour commute to New York City, where he worked at the investment­ banking firm of Drexel Firestone. The train would have provided a more comfortable and faster ride; but, for those very reasons, it also offered more opportunity to meet other Wall Street acquaintances. They would want to engage in the kind of idle small talk that commuters share to pass the time. The thought must have been intolerable. He did not wish to be rude, but he wanted no interrup­tion.

As soon as he had settled into his seat, being sure to take one with an empty one adjacent, he unloaded a mountain of prospectuses and 10ks (annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings) onto the seat next to him. On winter mornings the sky was still pitch black and the light on the bus was too dim for him to be able to read. He wore a leather aviation cap with the earflaps down; he had been bald for years, and although he wore a toupee his head always felt cold on these frosty mornings. Now over his aviation cap he fitted a miner's headlamp -- strapped around the back of his head, with a huge light projecting from his forehead.

My entire stack is meant to let me work offline in random locations. Until recently it was meant to run smoothly on a 12" Macbook. The output is also made for users on spotty internet connections. This comes from years of working while travelling. I can work offline for weeks if needed.

I sometimes do "iPad work", which is essentially researching, reviewing and annotating content on my iPad Mini. I will hop on my bike and work an hour or two in different locations, over coffee or in the sun. It's a relaxing break from working on a computer at a desk.

I do think that people should work in different places. Perhaps we'd have apps that work better on slow internet.

When I was living in Paris I had a 20 min ride from home to work each day. I picked up the habit to read during those 40 total minutes and I was going through books like I had never been able to, because while 40 min is not a lot, it’s about 150h per year. One easily underestimates the power of consistency.

I love making money for my employer with every spare moment of my life.

I used to do work on Caltrain, which used to be like 3 hours of my commute and didn't have any internet, so I would carefully plan what I could do beforehand. My code deploys to a machine that's very different from my laptop, but I had a Docker container set up to cross compile things and loaded up the docs beforehand, so as long as I planned out what I wanted to do.

These days Caltrain is faster and has occasionally frustrating, but fairly good Wi-Fi, so now my constraints are that I don't have a large monitor but not really much else.

I love to program on my commute. When I took NJ Transit bus, when I took NY Ferry, when I took MetroNorth.

But I’ve never felt comfortable opening a laptop on the NYC subway. It wasn’t about the safety that OP describes. It was about the culture and the physical configuration (facing middle with strap hangers vs facing front/back). It just didn’t feel right in the subway.

I do miss the MetroNorth Bar Car! I could drink and code and it was jovial.

> they would have to do it at a station, where they could immediately get off the train. I think, though, that this would be risky, given that subway stops generally have a lot of people getting on/off the train in the first place.

I've seen a phone jacking in this exact scenario and nobody moved to stop the guy running. Nobody on the train can help cause the doors have closed, and nobody on the platform has any idea anything just happened, or if they do the guy is well gone before they can put two and two together.

For me I always pocket my phone or e-reader at each stop, unless I'm in Japan or Taiwan.

> I don't even have an internet connection.

Vibe coders feeling a great disturbance in the force.

I’ve done this before, but you need a relatively long subway ride without any transfers. IMO, 30 minutes is just barely at the edge of being worthwhile, and only if you can get a seat right when you get on, and only if the seat isn’t so cramped that it’s actually possible to get your laptop out of your bag. This happens rarely.

But on longer trips from e.g. upper Manhattan to deep Brooklyn, particularly at off-peak hours when I have room to spread out—yeah, I’ve had some very productive sessions.

I have always enjoyed it. I have even gotten comments "can you really do anything in such a short period of time" but i have found that even 20 min sessions on a commute can be effective. For a major project I did the final push on such a commute just hoping the push could complete before the train reached the tunnel without coverage, and it did

Not often, and not recommended, but I have coded on the cockpit table while single-handing a sailboat. Interrupting a conference call with “sorry, one moment, I have to tack out of the fleet” is its own special joy.

With some noise cancelling headphones, it may actually help with focus. I'm a fan of doing things on the subway.